… die Überraschung

I’d like to thank our customers for their patience while the team reviewed several options for restoring import workflows and addressing quality in Lightroom. We can now confirm that, in our next dot release, we will restore the previous import experience. We are still working on details and timing. In the meantime, if you need to restore previous import functionality prior to the next update, please refer to this document on how to roll back to Lightroom 6.1.1 (https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom/kb/roll-back-to-prior-update.html).

I’d like to personally apologize for the quality of the Lightroom 6.2 release [Ich möchte mich persönlich für die Qualität von Lightroom 6.2 entschuldigen] we shipped on Monday. The team cares passionately about our product and our customers and we failed on multiple fronts with this release [wir haben bei dieser Version an mehreren Stellen Fehler gemacht]. In our efforts to simplify the import experience we introduced instability that resulted in a significant crashing bug. The scope of that bug was unclear and we made the incorrect decision to ship with the bug [wir haben falsch entschieden, {Lightroom} mit dem {bekannten} Fehler zu veröffentlichen] while we continued to search for a reproducible case(Reproducible cases are essential for allowing an engineer to solve a problem). The bug has been fixed and today’s update addresses the stability of Lightroom 6.

The simplification of the import experience was also handled poorly [Die Vereinfachung des Import-Formulars wurde ebenfalls schlecht gehandhabt]. Our customers, educators and research team have been clear on this topic: The import experience in Lightroom is daunting. It’s a step that every customer must successfully take in order to use the product and overwhelming customers with every option in a single screen was not a tenable path forward. We made decisions on sensible defaults and placed many of the controls behind a settings panel. At the same time we removed some of our very low usage features to further reduce complexity and improve quality. These changes were not communicated properly or openly before launch. Lightroom was created in 2006 via a 14 month public beta in a dialog with the photography community [Lightroom wurde 2006 nach einer 14monatigen öffentlichen Beta-Phase im Dialog mit der Fotografengemeinschaft entwickelt]. In making these changes without a broader dialog I’ve failed the original core values of the product and the team.

The team will continue to work hard to earn your trust back in subsequent releases and I look forward to reigniting the type of dialog we started in 2006.